KOFSMAN, Ze’ev Shlomo (?-1976)

was a French Jewish pastor who immigrated in 1948 after the State of Israel was established. He first came to faith, through a revelation of Yeshua as the Messiah in Upper-Volta, Africa, before the war. Upon his return to France, during the war, he miraculously found his wife, who three months later received the same revelation and became a messianic believer. After the war, he returned to medical work in the Ivory Coast and began pastoral work.

Three years later in 1948, he and his wife felt prophetically called to Israel where he became an early pioneer of the Messianic Jewish movement. They settled in Jerusalem, renting an apartment at 23, Prophets Street and refused to be evacuated to Scotland at the height of the War of Israel’s Independence, and instead they celebrated during Christmas what they would call “the rebirth of the Messianic Assembly in the heart of Israel.”

Kofsman co-founded with Eva Kronhaus, Rina Preiss, Yvette Kofsman (his wife), Izidor Wolf,  Abraham Fried, Avraham Zuhokowitch Ruth Appel, Shmuel Ekroth and Rachel Greenberg the “Israeli Messianic Assembly – Jerusalem Assembly,” (Kehila Meshihit Israelit – Kehilat Yerushalaim) which was the first indigenous Messianic Israeli congregation to be nominally registered with the Ministry of the Interior in 1958 as an Ottoman Society. They claimed continuity with the first Messianic Jewish assembly and asked the founders to recognize their civilian right under the Declaration of Independence of Israel with these words, “We are an assembly of Messianic Jews who believe in Yeshua the Messiah who came in the past and will return in the future as the Almighty promised in the Old Testament. We neither converted our religion or our faith since the Messiah himself said ‘I did not come to abolish the Torah but to fulfill it.’” They also expressed that 2000 years ago, Messianic Jews were part and parcel of the Jewish Nation in Jerusalem, and together with their people went to the Diaspora, suffered expulsions and wanderings. Now Jewish believers in Yeshua were returning to the Land with the ingathering of the people according to biblical prophecy. They emphasized that, “out of belief in Messiah in our thoughts and deeds we share the destiny of our people” (letter 23-2-1957). Two days later they received a positive reply and became a legitimate entity with the declared aims of providing a framework for common worship (Avodat Adonai) for the Messianic congregation in Israel. It did not become as originally intended a national body representing the consensus of Messianic Jews in Israel, but functioned as a local congregation in Jerusalem that aimed to “revive the characteristics of the first-century Jerusalem congregation.

Kofsmann taught along with Haimoff, Ben-Meir, Poljak and Ostrovsky that full Jewish hegemony in Jerusalem meant the end of the “Time of the Gentiles.” He published 10 articles of faith in Shalom, a magazine edited by French Pentecostals and edited HaLapid (The Torch), the official organ of the Assembly, with the help of Ben-Meir and Rina Preiss. HaLapid only had 4 issues in Hebrew from 1960-1962. The motto of the editors was to restore the characteristics of the 1st century Jerusalem congregation. They wrote, “exactly as the Jews do not come to this land as foreigners or invaders, but to inherit the patrimony of their forefathers, so we do not come to the Israeli Messianic Assembly as proselytes, but rather we ho are saved return to our spiritual possession.”

Kofsman died in 1976 and was buried in the Central Jewish Cementary of Givat Shaul in Jerusalem. After his death the journal Shalom was renamed Hashomer Israel and in 2005 Keren Israel.

Sources:

http://www.kerenisrael.ws/page3.html
“Mishkhan, Issue No. 29, 1998, A Messianic Jewish Church in Eretz Israel?”  by Gershon Nerel, in , [ http://www.caspari.com/mishkan/zips/mishkan29.pdf]
Zot HaBrit journal Spring 2000 - “HaLapid “(The Torch): The Second Journal of Messianic Jews in the State of IsraelHouse, Wayne (ed.), Israel, the Land and the People: an Evangelical Affirmation of God's Promises p. 129, Kregel Publications, 1998

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